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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>February 21, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[future concerns]<br>
<b>Texas Blackouts Point to Coast-to-Coast Crises Waiting to Happen</b><br>
Continent-spanning storms triggered blackouts in Oklahoma and
Mississippi, halted one-third of U.S. oil production and disrupted
vaccinations in 20 states...<br>
- -<br>
Heightening the cost to society, disruptions can disproportionately
affect lower-income households and other vulnerable groups,
including older people or those with limited English.<br>
<br>
“All these issues are converging,” said Robert D. Bullard, a
professor at Texas Southern University who studies wealth and racial
disparities related to the environment. “And there’s simply no place
in this country that’s not going to have to deal with climate
change.”...<br>
- -<br>
“We should be evaluating whether these facilities or sites actually
have to be moved or re-secured,” said Lisa Evans, senior counsel at
Earthjustice, an environmental law organization. Places that “may
have been OK in 1990,” she said, “may be a disaster waiting to
happen in 2021.”...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/climate/united-states-infrastructure-storms.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/climate/united-states-infrastructure-storms.html</a>
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<p><br>
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[The big question]<br>
<b>Therapy for the End of the World</b><br>
Anxiety over the climate crisis is spreading like wildfire.
Psychologists are just starting to figure out how to help<br>
BY BRITT WRAY - Feb. 10, 2021<br>
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2019, the category five storm Hurricane Dorian
slammed into the Bahamas with gusts of 354 kilometres per hour and
storm surges of over six metres. Instead of sweeping up what it
could before steadily moving on, Dorian was patient, pummelling the
islands for over forty hours straight. More than 70,000 people were
displaced and 13,000 homes destroyed. On land, as the morgues filled
up, bodies were piled high in refrigerated containers.
Search-and-rescue dogs sniffed out corpses from under the debris;
many were buried too deep for anyone to reach. Though the official
death toll was seventy-four, some—including the Bahamas health
minister at the time—believe the real number is much, much higher.<br>
Bethuel Nyachienga is a mental health expert who has provided
psychosocial support to more than 4,000 Hurricane Dorian survivors
since September 2019. Nyachienga says the most common effects that
survivors of catastrophes like this one report are insomnia,
depression, and feeling retraumatized every time the wind is strong.
What’s clearer from observation is the excessive drinking and drug
consumption that many survivors don’t want to talk about. A 2017
report from the American Psychological Association (APA) titled
Mental Health and Our Changing Climate details this kind of fallout,
describing how PTSD, suicidality, depression, compounded stress,
domestic abuse, child abuse, and substance abuse often spike after
climate-linked calamities.<br>
<br>
Even far away from these disasters, psychologists are now finding,
just knowing about the severity of our climate predicament can take
its own kind of toll. In recent years, the climate and wider
ecological crisis has led to an explosion of what has been termed
eco-anxiety, which the APA defines as the “chronic fear of
environmental doom.” It is born of the barrage of increasingly worse
environmental news combined with the knowledge that actions taken so
far to address the problem have been ineffective or insufficient,
and it destroys people’s capacity to feel safe in the world. The
stress of worrying about the future of the biosphere, the species,
one’s community, and one’s life, as well as already occurring
environmental disasters, can look more like cycling through grief,
fear, shame, guilt, resignation, despair, and nihilism than just
anxiety...<br>
- <br>
Stress levels are on the rise, and young people, who feel betrayed
by older generations that aren’t cleaning up their own mess, are the
most susceptible. As one young climate striker’s sign put it: “We
won’t die from old age. We’ll die from climate change.” Another’s
asked: “Why Should I Study For a Future I Won’t Have?”...<br>
- -<br>
“I’ve been seeing teens who [felt] suicidal because the pain and
distress . . . from the coronavirus is finally starting to mirror
how they’ve been feeling about climate change for a long time, and
they’re wondering, Why on earth can’t people recognize the scale of
the threat in the longer term?” says Caroline Hickman, a British
clinical psychotherapist...<br>
- -<br>
The field is emerging, and the evidence base is not yet firmly
established for which approaches work best to help people manage
their environmentally linked distress. That’s partly because
eco-anxiety is not a pathology. You won’t find it listed as a
condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, and climate-aware therapists aren’t rushing to include
it. “What you don’t want is for people to first and foremost think
their eco-anxiety is in itself a problem,” Hickman says. It is a
natural response to a real and unfolding threat, so the only label
it deserves is “reasonable.” After all, what’s more daunting than
realizing we’re all stuck on a cooking rock and have wasted the
bulwark of precious time we had to cool it off before everything
changes irreversibly? She typically tells her eco-anxious clients
that their feelings are “a sign that you’re waking up; there’s
nothing wrong with you. Welcome to a community that can share and
mirror your concerns.”...<br>
- -<br>
What traps people in eco-anxiety, Hickman says, is not their
difficult feelings themselves but the feelings they have about their
difficult feelings. Often, we resist these feelings because we fear
they’ll ruin our lives if we give them space. But it is this
resistance to feelings we’ve been raised to think are negative, like
vulnerability and grief, that make them frightening. A biomedical
approach to therapy would file such hopelessness under depression
and try to treat it with a pill. But several climate-aware
therapists use mindfulness as a strategy to help their clients bear
those painfully barren thoughts and feelings. The key lies in
embracing complex emotions, Hickman says. This is another important
aspect of addressing eco-anxiety, Davenport says: after you validate
the legitimacy of the feelings, you learn not to banish them but to
live with and, ideally, channel them....<br>
- -<br>
Hogan is Australian. The record-breaking bushfires of the 2019/20
summer, which burned more than 20 percent of Australia’s forests,
marked the first time she grieved the loss of a part of her culture
along with a part of herself. The fires forced her to look at the
more than 3 billion animals that were harmed or killed, and her
friends who lost their homes, and think, “Okay, I really get that we
are fighting for our lives; this is do or die.”<br>
<br>
What Hogan finds hardest is accepting that all the action in the
world may not be enough to save humanity and so many other species.
Instead of advising her to banish that upsetting thought from her
consciousness, climate-aware therapist Hickman (who has also served
as a bit of a mentor) has helped her tap into it in order to keep
going without expectation of what fruits her efforts will bear.
Hogan will continue with her coaching work regardless of the
outcomes. “Now that I’ve gone to the dark place of grief I was
afraid of and come out the other side, I see I’m okay,” she says,
“and it makes me feel more authentic in my hope for the future.” <br>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://thewalrus.ca/therapy-for-the-end-of-the-world/">https://thewalrus.ca/therapy-for-the-end-of-the-world/</a></p>
- -<br>
<p>[video by author Britt Wray]</p>
<b>Why Emotionally Intelligent Climate Work Matters</b><br>
Oct 15, 2020<br>
Project InsideOut<br>
50 subscribers<br>
In the closing remarks of our Summit, Dr. Britt Wray explains why
emotional intelligence is essential for the survival of our planet.
Visit <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://projectinsideout.net/">https://projectinsideout.net/</a> - for more information.<br>
- -<br>
[How to handle it all]<br>
<b>Project InsideOut</b> A new world is emerging.<br>
As individuals, organizations, and changemakers, we have committed
ourselves to transformational change. However, our work is often
caught in a cycle between hope and despair, action and inaction,
connection and disconnection. To break that cycle, we need to find a
new way.<br>
A way of leading while the world wakes up.<br>
We face a pivot point.<br>
As a global community, we navigate climate and environmental crises
together—enormous changes that require us all to level up.<br>
It’s up to each of us how we respond. Will we default to our usual
strategies, or will we choose differently?<br>
Guiding Principles<br>
<blockquote>Attune: Understand your people.<br>
Reveal: This is hard stuff. That’s OK.<br>
Convene: Less talking at. More talking with.<br>
Sustain: Go beyond the pledge.<br>
</blockquote>
Download the Guide
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://projectinsideout.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Be-a-Guide.pdf">https://projectinsideout.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Be-a-Guide.pdf</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://projectinsideout.net/">https://projectinsideout.net/</a><br>
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</p>
[Scientist warning on CNBC]<br>
<b>U.S. must go ‘well beyond Paris commitments’ to avert
catastrophic global warming, warns scientist</b><br>
- The U.S. officially rejoined the Paris Agreement on climate
change. <br>
- “We have to ratchet up the commitments now if we are to stay on
course to averting a catastrophic three degree Fahrenheit warming,”
said scientist Michael Mann.<br>
- “The world has moved on from American leadership on climate and
will be skeptical of our commitment to stay engaged,” said Joel
Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the
Obama-Biden Administration.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/19/us-must-go-well-beyond-paris-commitments-to-avert-global-warming.html">https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/19/us-must-go-well-beyond-paris-commitments-to-avert-global-warming.html</a><br>
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[Meanwhile, why do we attack ourselves?]<br>
<b>Climate Deniers Backed Violence and Spread Pro-Insurrection
Messages Before, During, and After January 6</b><br>
By Sharon Kelly • Tuesday, February 16, 2021<br>
On the evening of January 6, 2021, the day of the insurrection at
the U.S. Capitol, former coal mining executive Don Blankenship, who
ran against Donald Trump as a third-party candidate in the 2020
election, began an all-caps Twitter thread.<br>
<br>
“Why is it that American politicians and the American media support
citizen uprisings in China, Poland, South Africa, and throughout the
world, but when an American citizen is killed during an uprising
against a corrupt American government the citizens are at fault?”
@DonBlankenship posted on Twitter.<br>
<br>
“Members of the media and the government are all saying what we saw
today doesn’t work — but that is only because they don’t want it to
work,” the thread continues. “What we saw today is what freed
Americans from King George and England.”<br>
<br>
Blankenship at one time served as the CEO of Massey Energy Company,
a coal mining company that at one time was Appalachia’s largest coal
producer. He later served a one-year prison sentence after he was
convicted of conspiracy to violate mine safety standards, causing
the 2010 deaths of 29 coal miners at the Upper Big Branch Mine in
West Virginia.<br>
<br>
The former coal CEO is, to be sure, no stranger to Twitter
controversy. In 2013, for example, Rolling Stone ranked one of
Blankenship’s tweets number three on its list of the top 10 “dumbest
things ever said about global warming.”<br>
<br>
Blankenship was also hardly alone among white-collar climate science
deniers in expressing support for the January 6 insurrection at the
U.S. Capitol.<br>
<br>
A review of social media posts and online publications by DeSmog
found dozens of prominent climate deniers — both individuals and
organizations — posted messages supporting the insurrectionists,
spread debunked claims about election fraud, hinted at civil war,
or, in one case, suggested that Twitter’s effort to remove online
disinformation about the election should be viewed as “worse than
9-11.”...<br>
- -<br>
Several prominent opponents of climate action also circulated false
or unsupported claims about the 2020 elections before or after
January 6.<br>
<br>
Angela Logomasini is listed as a senior fellow by the Competitive
Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative policy group that opposes
climate action and has received fossil fuel industry funding. She
was a co-author of a 2016 CEI report urging the incoming Trump
administration to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the
international climate accord. Her Twitter account — now removed —
posted multiple times about the 2020 election, including a retweet
of a January 5 call to “FIGHT BACK w @RealDonaldTrump.”...<br>
- -<br>
Pro-violence social media posts by Marc Morano, communications
director for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a
Washington, D.C.-based think tank, were previously reported by
DeSmog. “Striking fear in politicians is not a bad thing,” Morano’s
@ClimateDepot account tweeted on the afternoon of January 6 in a
message describing the Capitol as then “under siege.” He added a
quote from Thomas Jefferson that has been cited in support of other
violent rebellions (including, for instance, Oklahoma City bomber,
Timothy McVeigh): “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time
to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”...<br>
- -<br>
A “Mass Radicalization” Wave on the Right<br>
The U.S. has recently experienced a wave of so-called “mass
radicalization” that security experts say has blurred the lines
between what's considered mainstream and fringe on the right, a wave
whose high-water mark to date was the January 6 insurrection.<br>
<br>
Climate denial, a fringe view among scientists, remained remarkably
popular on the right in the U.S. in recent years, even as most of
the rest of the world has increasingly rejected it as unsupported by
evidence. (Researchers have also separately linked conspiratorial
thinking to both climate denial and to U.S. right-wing politics.)<br>
<br>
As the mass radicalization wave surged, some individual opponents of
climate action may have been swept along by its broad rightward
push, propelling them closer to endorsing political violence....<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2021/02/16/climate-deniers-messages-support-capitol-insurrection">https://www.desmogblog.com/2021/02/16/climate-deniers-messages-support-capitol-insurrection</a><br>
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<br>
[Inside Climate News - economic]<br>
<b>How Much Does Climate Change Cost? Biden Expected to Raise
Carbon’s Dollar Value</b><br>
The administration is expected to temporarily increase the “social
cost” of carbon, at least to the level set by Obama, but
climate-concerned economists say that's not high enough.<br>
By Marianne Lavelle<br>
February 19, 2021<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19022021/carbon-cost-biden-climate-change/">https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19022021/carbon-cost-biden-climate-change/</a><br>
<br>
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<br>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
February 21, 2012 </b></font><br>
February 21, 2012: Conservative blogger Steven L. Taylor calls out
GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum for his repeated denials of
climate change:<br>
<blockquote>"[C]onservatives ultimately see any attempt at
environment regulation as really not about the environment anyway,
but about an excuse for increased government control. Not only
does this pay into general concerns about 'big government' but
this strand of the argument asserts that all this
researchy/sciencey talk is just a ruse: those guys aren’t really
scientists interested in understanding the environment. No! They
are Marxists in lab coats looking to fool you all into socialism!<br>
<br>
"Now, understand: I do not consider myself an expert on climate
change. I do not even have especially strong views on the
subject, although I do accept the rather overwhelming scientific
consensus that we have a climate change problem. What this means
in terms of policy is another issue. However, I find it
problematic when politicians hand-wave over serious issues [due
to] some inherent belief that they understand topics that would
otherwise require a lifetime of study to understand...Further,
while I understand concerns over taxes and regulations, that
doesn’t make issues like pollution go away.<br>
<br>
"In short: if one is going to make arguments on this topic (and
seek to influence policy in this arena) I would like to see more
than appeals to the Biblical creation story and fear mongering
about government control."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/santorum-and-climate-change-theology/">http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/santorum-and-climate-change-theology/</a><br>
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